Back Shop: Industry Insights

They say the works of William Shakespeare are immortal. That may be true, but then, so are yours. As long as someone owns or operates an aircraft that you’ve maintained, your log entries, complete with signature and certificate number, are with that aircraft.

The first airplane I owned was a 1946 Aeronca Champ. I bought it for the princely sum of $1,100, flew it for about a year to get my Private ticket. I was amazed at what the IA doing the annual inspection found broken or worn out — things that I had looked at every time I did a pre-flight inspection and had never even given a second thought. I realized right then that if I were going to be flying for the rest of my life, I’d best go to A&P school so I’d know what I was doing on the walkaround. I sold the Champ to get up the tuition money, making enough profit on the deal to pay for my flying expenses to that point. A selling point for the plane was that I had all the maintenance records, going back to when my Champ left the factory. All the log entries were there with names, dates, hours and certificate numbers. That plane is now listed in the FAA records as "Registration Pending" in Woodstock, Ga., more than 60 years since new. The "A&E" mechanics who had worked on it back then are probably all gone, but like William Shakespeare, their writings are still alive and will remain so as long as N2707E keeps flying.

Log entries say a lot about the people who made them, both good and not so good. With today’s spell checkers, there’s no reason why misspellings should be in aircraft maintenance records, but they are still there, letting the whole world know that some aircraft mechanics still insist that there are two "i"s in "rivet." How many entries have you seen that you couldn’t even read due to sloppy penmanship? While thanks to Bill Gates, that’s not as much of a problem today as it used to be, those entries will still be there forever. What does that say to the world (and the FAA) about the people who did the work?

The bottom line is that you should consider the ramifications of your writings as though your livelihood may depend on the quality of what you write. It just might.

1. Write your entry as though you’ll have to defend it in court many years after you’ve forgotten exactly what it is you did. You just may have to.

2. Neatness really does count. A concise, legible log entry indicates professionalism to FAA inspectors and auditors.

3. If you’re responding to a pilot discrepancy, make sure your corrective action matches the problem. Inappropriate corrective actions, even though they might get the plane out of town and back on schedule, will make you look downright incompetent in front of a plaintiff’s attorney, judge and jury. (I know personally of a case where this cost a major airline $500,000 in jury awarded damages, but that’s a story for another time.)

What and how you make your maintenance record entries is at least as important as the work that went into the physical maintenance. If you don’t have 14 CFR 43.9 memorized yet, put that on today’s to-do list. More violations are handed out on record-keeping than any other part of the maintenance regulations.

Make your entries as though they’ll be memory-joggers for your court testimony five years down the line, including references to the appropriate maintenance manual sections by which you performed any troubleshooting. Ask yourself this: If an FAA inspector were to read your entry, would he or she be able to duplicate your work from what you wrote? If not, you need more detail. An overly broad reference to Chapter 32 of the manufacturer’s maintenance manual, for example, is not adequate if what you did was change a tire assembly. Do yourself a liability favor and cite the specific paragraph(s) you used. There’s no need to commit yourself to the entire chapter, which could get you in trouble if a brake or strut is leaking on the next pilot preflight or FAA ramp inspection.

This is why side two of the FAA Form 337 is completely devoted to the description of the maintenance performed –— major repairs and alterations need major descriptions of what took place. Just like your log entries, 337s live forever, both in the permanent maintenance records and in the FAA’s Oklahoma City records branch.

Doctor’s prescriptions expire. Software is obsolete with Version 1.1. Patents expire in 17 years. Copyrights run out if not updated. The landfills are full of paperwork that people put a lot of effort into, but that was of only transitory importance. Your words in an aircraft’s maintenance records, however, are far more enduring than any of the above. They live as long as that aircraft exists. If yours is now or in the future among them, God bless you, for you are truly immortal.